


A World of Dew (within the dewdrop)

by Ayespii



Category: Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Administrator Clay | Dream (Video Blogging RPF), Amnesia, Author Is Sleep Deprived, Author is a Clay | Dream Apologist (Video Blogging RPF), BAMF Clay | Dream (Video Blogging RPF), Clay | Dream Angst (Video Blogging RPF), Clay | Dream Needs a Hug (Video Blogging RPF), Clay | Dream-centric (Video Blogging RPF), Demonic Possession, Everyone Needs A Hug, Family Feels, Flashbacks, Healing, Honestly just trauma, How to pick yourself up after being possessed, Hurt Clay | Dream (Video Blogging RPF), Hurt/Comfort, Injury Recovery, It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better, Major Character Injury, Memory Loss, Mental Breakdown, Near Death Experiences, Nightmares, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Prison, Redemption, Running Away, Touch-Starved, as told by Dream, coding references for Dream's admin commands, gratuitous use of flashbacks
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-15
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-16 09:01:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29451219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ayespii/pseuds/Ayespii
Summary: He wakes up in the middle of a grassy field, coughing up black blood that withers the dandelion where the droplets land. He can't remember his name, he has strange scars all over his body, and memories only come during the most inopportune times and none of them seem to be good. Nothing in his strange, new life is normal, and this only becomes clearer when he falls off the edge of the world because the chunks didn't load in.Falling into the void, discovering admin powers, and meeting a corrupted version of yourself really has a way of kickstarting an adventure, he supposes.Or: Dream kind of sort of dies but he wakes up anyways. Finally clear-minded but without any memories, he rediscovers himself, his demons, and his friends. It's much harder than it sounds.
Relationships: Clay | Dream & GeorgeNotFound & Sapnap (Video Blogging RPF), Clay | Dream & Phil Watson (Video Blogging RPF), Clay | Dream & Wilbur Soot & Technoblade & TommyInnit & Phil Watson
Comments: 9
Kudos: 266





	A World of Dew (within the dewdrop)

**Author's Note:**

> “A World of Dew” by Kobayashi Issa
> 
> A world of dew,
> 
> And within every dewdrop
> 
> A world of struggle.

_ “Sometimes it is better to lose and do the right thing than to win and do the wrong thing.” --Tony Blair _

The sky is blue and the grass is green and it feels normal even though he can’t seem to remember why it would be normal. He’s lying on his back, a thick sensation in his throat so he turns his head and coughs. A small ball of mucus exits in response, landing on a dandelion, marring yellow petals a dark black as it congeals into a strange dark mass once exposed to the air. He ignores it, turning instead to peer up at the sky again, too weak to keep his body half-turned as it was. There’s still a scratch in his throat and a weight in his chest like he needs to cough and hack something up again, but he can barely summon the energy to blink, much less cough again. 

It’s the middle of the day-- the sun is high in the sky but gentle white clouds are concealing the worst of the brightness. There’s a breeze that feels cool against his exposed arms, and if he weren’t in the sun, he’s sure he would feel cold. The wind carries the faint scent of flowers and blood, and his mouth tastes like copper and sandstone. It’s a little concerning, especially considering how he can’t remember why the world is beautiful but also excruciatingly painful. 

There’s this ferocious aching in his chest, this pounding throb that seems to echo with each beat of his heart, and even resting a limp palm against his ribs does not seem to help. He can feel his bony ribs through the thin cloth of whatever he’s wearing-- the thinness, the fragility of bone. His head is on fire but the sky is blue and soothing, so he leaves his eyes half-slit against the sky and tries to not think about it. He might be bleeding but his arms only dully sting. His knee hurts, not a sting or a throb, just a pain. It hurts less when he doesn’t think about moving. 

It’s only when the sun begins to set and the wind shifts from a comforting caress to a maliciously cold biter that he decides he should try to move. Sitting up is hard, and for the first time since he woke up in the field, he takes in his entire body. His skin is pale, frighteningly so, as if it hadn’t seen the sun in ages. It crosses his mind that maybe he lives in a cave and hit his head too hard, but the thought of darkness and enclosed walls sends a strange shiver through his nerves that he doesn’t want to question further. 

He’s wearing ragged blue jeans, patchy and worn but perhaps once well-loved. He only has one boot. His knee is swollen and hot to touch when he reaches out to it, but he doesn’t want to immediately vomit when he attempts to shift, so he considers that a plus. 

The green hoodie is horrifically torn and there’s definitely dried blood on it, and the strange scratches on his arm and cut on his hand can’t take credit for all of the red on his clothes. It’s strangely washed out, however, as if somebody attempted to dunk the clothes in water but lacked the means to actually get rid of the stains. Worse is the strange hole in the hoodie, right at his sternum, and when he gently pokes it with a finger, he feels a strangely upraised scar on his skin. There’s no explanation for it, so he shrugs the quiet questions away. He exhales, looking around. 

There are trees, a large mountain in the distance, and grass. If he concentrates, he can maybe hear the faint gurgle of a river. There’s nothing on him, nothing as cliche as a note or a notebook, no charms or trinkets that could possibly serve to spark his memory. Perhaps stranger is the fact that there are no footsteps in the earth or any flattened grass around his resting place. It was as if he simply appeared, lying down in that field of green. 

It’s a strange sensation: not remembering anything, not remembering why it might be important to remember something. At worst, there’s a faint itch in the back of his brain, deep enough so he can’t physically scratch it but not debilitating enough to want to meditate or something stupid to try and get at it. 

He just simply is. 

Until he simply isn’t alone because it’s night and suddenly, he’s scrambling into a half-crouch and rolling on nothing but sheer instinct to avoid an arrow that sinks into the ground an inch away from where he was before. His eyes flick up, adrenaline pounding through his veins as he reaches behind his back for something that isn’t there and something that he doesn’t remember is supposed to be there as the skeleton nocks another arrow. 

Game plans are already soaring into existence in his mind, clearer than he could have ever wanted, but most of them go out the window when the dark, open clearing decides to make it world vs. him rather than just a one vs. one. The groan of a zombie is a little too close to comfort, so he grits his teeth and turns to run, knee singing angrily with each desperate step against soft earth that had felt nice lying in but now was a bit of a detriment to limping. 

Ducking into the forest, he begins to run, and all of a sudden 

_ “He’s getting away! What the fuck guys?!”  _

_ The young man in question lets out a sharp cackle, oh so different than his usual wheezy chuckle, flying through the woods with his stolen sword in hand. He takes a moment to dig his teeth into the chunks of obsidian still buried in the palm of his other palm, wrenching them out and spitting them onto the ground, ignoring the way his hands burn with blood.  _

An arrow thunks into the trunk next to him and he 

_ Spins around, sword already nimbly twisting a simple block into a dangerous counter as he shifts his momentum, batting away the offending sword and grinning behind a mask as he slams his sword into the offender’s shoulder. The hoarse scream of agony is quickly followed by the worried and angry shouts of his other pursuers, so he regretfully wrenches his sword free and kicks the other down onto the forest floor, spinning on a heel to keep running. He feels free as a kite and the wind in his hair has never felt so good after months of being locked away. It only takes a quick breath to shout  _

“Catch me if you can!” he calls to the spider that is hopping from tree to tree to gain on him as he dives an unsuspecting skeleton that somehow hadn’t heard his awkward clomping gait through the deadly forest. What he hadn’t been expecting was the surprising failing of his muscles as the attempt to wrench the bow out of skeletal hands met an unexpected amount of resistance, and he knows that he should’ve been able to do it easily. It’s not a clear memory, but he knows it.

He should have been strong enough to do it, so why are his arms trembling with the effort? He can see the bones of his wrist and the way the skin on his scratched arms cling to his bone must not be healthy, but he has greater issues at the moment than dealing with his apparent malnourishment. 

The young man is quick to improvise, bracing as he balances on his bad leg to land a kick in the joint of the skeleton. The subtle unbalancing interrupts their strange tug-of-war as he wrenches the bow free, ignoring the angry chattering of bones as he does so. It takes about a second and a half to swing the bow like a club to bash the skeleton’s skull against a tree and about three to seize an arrow from the skeleton’s quiver, smoothly placing it into the bow’s waiting grip to pin the spider leaping at him against an oak. 

His knee is wailing in pain as he scoops the quiver off of the skeleton’s back, and he desperately wants to question why the weapon feels so natural in his hands or who the people chasing him in the woods before were as he hastily limps away from the mob carnage he had left behind. 

The quick snippet of memory is like a blurry dream, fading away every second even as he clings futilely at the details. Fading away every second is also his supply of arrows because apparently he had forgotten that it was dangerous to be out at night, and he wishes that he had felt some type of urgency earlier in the day when he had been doing nothing but laying around like a useless log cloud-gazing. 

Every snap of a branch or twitch of a leaf has an arrow pointed at it as he continues on through what feels like endless dark trees and bushes. His forearm burns from where an arrow had skimmed it, and he’s practically dragging along his bad leg at this point because he had fallen when a spider had pounced on him. He had escaped the encounter without any dangerous bitemarks, but landing hard on unforgiving tree roots was surprisingly painful, especially for his irritatingly frail body. 

If he ever had the opportunity to speak to his past self, he definitely had a few choice words for them, specifically about going outside, exercise, and their eating habits. 

He’s lost track of the number of mobs that have either jump scared him or received an arrow in the head when he comes across an abandoned cabin. There’s a dilapidated gate that is more rotten wood than the fence, and he doesn’t think twice about pushing the poor thing over as he stumbles towards the door. 

The two windows are both shattered, although one retains more glass than the other, and as he steps inside, he has to gingerly avoid the dusty shards that litter the floor. It’s littered in dust-- the table must have so much that it’s almost an inch thick when he experimentally runs a finger along it. There are two chairs, both tipped over, and some half-open cabinets that reveal nothing of immediate use. There’s even a couch, and although it looks comfortable, he doubts it would support his weight. 

There’s another room, and it merits a bed and some dusty clothes that would be a size too large if he attempted to wear any of it. Despite all of the signs of abandonment and disrepair, the young man still feels wary, and with only two arrows left, he wonders if he’ll ever feel safe again. He does find another pair of shoes, though, so he changes into those although they feel a little bit too big. It is better than just one boot, he supposes. 

Fortunately, the mobs seemed to have lost his scent, and although some still mill around outside, none come to pound angrily at the barely holding door. He perches by the window sill once he deems the cabin cleared, and resigns himself to a long night because sleep meant letting his guard down, and relaxing meant death. 

The cabin is completely unfamiliar, and considering that he must have traveled what felt like at least a mile during his frenzied run through the woods and had come across nothing but trees that all looked the same, he doubted that there was any civilization nearby. That is, if civilization existed at all. 

He let out a small sigh, not relaxing his iron grip on the worn and chipped wood of his bow as he hefts himself up into the window sill. The glass is somehow intact, and although he can see a spider web in every corner of the small edge, it’s almost comforting as he finally takes the pressure off his leg. 

With arrows still easily in reach in case something breaks down the door, he rolls up his jeans to look at his injured limb. It is too dark to see clearly, and after a hiss of pain and about a minute of fiddling and poking at it, he resigns himself to just trying to fix it in the morning. The morning that feels an eternity away. Perched where he is, he has a perfect view of the front yard. Confident that he will be able to stay alert in case of danger, the young man just briefly closes his eyes.

Just for a moment. It is all that it takes. 

Despite a firm attempt not to, he nods off, sitting in the window and leaning against the sill.

The bow relaxes in his grip and 

_ The sword falls from his limp hands as he reaches up, gagging on the blood that immediately springs to his mouth as he stumbles backward. The sensation of enchantments wash over him and he glances upwards, eyes wide with shock as they meet ones that he can’t see behind dark goggles.  _

The wood makes a faint clacking sound as it hits the ground 

_ He coughs, and the blood is definitely black but it’s impossible for anyone but him to tell because the moon is only a thin sliver and nobody’s looking at what he’s hacking up, they’re all looking at the netherite sword embedded in his chest. He wants to scream because everything is going wrong and it had gone wrong all those months ago and the sensation is infuriating and  _

He shivers in his sleep because the wind is cold and he only has his hoodie 

_ Everybody seems frozen as he takes one step back, and another, and it’s freezing tonight. Of course he had to choose a cold night to escape, if one could call it choosing. One visitor too many, one too many reminders of everything he had lost and the return to darkness and obsidian had driven him past any rational thought, and one moment he had been screaming into the void and the next he had been breaking raw obsidian with his fist. He wants to laugh but he can’t breathe but he finds the strength to open his mouth and look at his murderer to say  _

He startles awake because he was slipping off the window sill but for a moment 

_ Desperate hands reach out to him but he’s giving a small salute with a sad grin and all of his strength exits his body in one fell swoop as he falls backward off the edge of the cliff, sword still embedded in his chest and the stars are screaming at him but they all mute as soon as he hits the rushing water at the bottom of the ravine.  _

The cabin is quiet except for his intense, panicked breathing as he tries to wrestle with the sensation of falling and a horrid pain in his chest. There’s a sharp pain in his hands, and he sits back to look at them, and for a horrid moment, the shards are black and thin and slicing but then he blinks and they’re clear glass, glowing a reflective silver in the moonlight that filters through the window.

It feels like forever until the sun peeks over the treetops and all of the dangers either burn alive or duck back into hiding for the next night. It’s only after the sun warms his hair that he finds the strength to stand, twitching as he picks shards of glass from his palms with strangely practiced motions. Like splinters. 

He ignores the sensation of splinters in his chest because he knows there’s nothing wrong with him there except for a scar over his heart. 

If this were anybody else’s story, anybody else’s life, he’s sure that this is where their book would begin. They would compose themselves and their strangely fragmented pieces of trauma in order to fix the cabin up. They would go out and collect some wood, maybe pluck some seeds and start a farm. They would fix themselves, fix their clothes, fix their memories and figure out why they were alone and--

Whoever he is, he can most assuredly say that he is not that person. This realization is not immediate, but the delusion fades away with the faint scent of smoke that he picks up only moments after wondering how long it would take to get rid of the dust on the couch. The smell is frightfully familiar, and he only has a split second to be grateful that it doesn’t trigger a weird memory dream sequence as he scrambles to search for the source. 

A zombie is burning alive and has fallen against the wooden wall of the cabin, and it’s too late to try and save the structure. He lets out a sharp curse, waiting a brief moment for a reprimand that will never come (not anymore), before rushing back into the cabin to try and save some of the raggedy but still whole clothes from the closet. 

The next minute is a rush of adrenaline that had replenished during his sleep, but the end result is still a burnt cabin that is now rotten bits of wood and ashes, stained with the smell of crisped rotten flesh and his stomach grumbles despite everything, despite the sickening roil in his gut. 

His mouth burns with smoke and he coughs harshly, suddenly realizing how dehydrated and how hungry he is. He would pay whatever remains of his soul for a glass of water. It reminds him of the Nether and how 

_ He would laugh, racing across red brick and sweating, a lava-warmed breeze caressing his hair but not burning his cheeks because of his mask. He-- _

There is no time to remember because the cabin is burning down and it really is just his luck. If this is a sign of things that are to come, he does not want any part of it. 

He wants to fall to his knees. He can’t, so instead, he sits back in the dry dirt where a thin path had been carved out from the fence gate to the remnants of somebody’s house. He is suddenly filled with the urge to cry because that little smidgeon of hope, that little candle wick that had imagined a fixed cabin and a nice farm and a few cows is gone now. He finds this emotion of loss hope achingly familiar, and it hurts and his chest hurts with it. 

“Guess it was never meant to be,” he mutters, and his voice is unfamiliar in his ears. The worn bow that made it out with a few shirts and jackets stares mockingly at him, and he turns away from it to look at the burnt ashes of 

_ L’manberg is burning alive and he’s laughing and laughing and laughing  _

The cabin and he supposes that nothing ever good will happen to him. A few flames still crackle as they struggle to live on nothing but dark splinters, and he turns his eyes away to 

_ A mirror stares back at him and underneath his mask is dark eyes that he doesn’t recognize but it feels right. He feels great, but he doesn’t feel like himself. He wants to crawl out of his skin. He wants to scream. He feels like  _

Wiping away the wetness in his eyes, he carefully folds the clothes into one jacket to form a backpack of sorts. There is this headache-- it is not a migraine because it pounds right behind his eyes and not in the back of his skull. It is not demanding but it itches and he presses soot-covered palms against his eyelids, begging for it to go away. He feels like he stared at the sun too long but instead of spots of neon blurring his vision, it is memories and memories that do not make sense. 

There is no time for self-pity and wallowing, as he had learned the hard way yesterday, so he attaches the tied up jacket to a stick in the yard and suddenly feels homeless. He wants to laugh because he is just a wandering forest hobo, without home or memories. Maybe he was a druggie, maybe he is a wanted criminal, maybe he was kidnapped. He cannot find it in himself to care, or so he tells himself. The thoughts are a dark rabbit hole and he needs to find shelter for the night. 

It only takes an hour of wandering and a lucky bush of sweet berries later to realize that he really is in the middle of nowhere. He had picked east and just began to walk, bow over his shoulder, stick and jacket bag in one hand and a walk stick in the other. The forest eventually thins out to flowery plains with mountains in the background. He is only thankful that the land is mostly flat. Hills are killer on his knee. 

He has discovered that he can whistle, but when he purses his lips to sing a song, nothing comes to mind. It is a little disconcerting, and he has never wished for music or another person to talk to before. It is the first time that the loneliness really hits him, and it is not the last time he has to forcefully shove the emotion away. 

He likes to stare up at the sky when he walks, and this is why he does not notice when he steps off the edge of the world. The cloud had looked like a pair of goggles and it itched at his brain and it had felt  _ important _ so he had allowed himself to be distracted. One moment he is stepping over flowers and the next he is tilting forward and his eyes widen because there is nothing but void. 

The void is not black. It is the same color as the sky as if the ground had never existed and he was living on a floating island. There is this endless stretch of blue and it is so unnatural and he cannot help but scream as he flails ungracefully but it is too late because he is tipping forward over the edge. 

_ And then he’s falling and the water is freezing cold when he hits it and his head hits a rock and it jolts something so horribly wrong that black is exploding from every orifice and somebody that sounds like him in his head is screaming not in the pain that he’s feeling but anger and he’s screaming too so there are two voices in his head and  _

He’s falling and this should not be possible. Sure, he has no memories, but his two-day existence has already taught him that he must have been somebody with memories before. It is evident in the way he fights, the way he survives, the way he has strange almost-memories. Some things are familiar: the sweet berries, the wild carrot he washed and ate, the way he holds a bow. Some things are not: his surroundings, the injuries on his body, the way his head hurts. Still, there are things that are and things that are not. 

The void is wrong, a visceral mistake in reality and he throws out his arms as he is swallowed by nothing but blue nothingness. He cannot seem to close his eyes no matter how much he wants to so he takes in the wall next to the void, the cliff that he had fallen off of. He sees the earth: each layer of dirt, rock, ore, and then there is a stratum of bedrock and he is not falling into the void, he is falling off the edge of the world. 

This is impossible because  _ he had made this world _ .  _ He made it so that new chunks loaded automatically so something must be wrong with his powers if this is happening.  _

He had reached the edge of it, the limit of his power and that was impossible because he was  _ Dream _ and he had made this not only for himself, but  _ for his friends, too _ . He must have reached the edge of the chunks that had initially loaded and he narrows his eyes and throws out his arms. 

The blue screen that appears for him feels incorrect, sickeningly familiar but also wrong because what should be comforting letters that list out his abilities are scrambled and covered in darkness. Strangely, the darkness seems scattered as if somebody had punched through it and dispersed it. Still, it moves actively around the screen and he wishes that he had known how to do this earlier so he could explore it better. But of course, he only remembers his super badass abilities moments before death. 

He does not have the luxury of time to think about it because he is about to die by falling out of the world, so he types. 

_ @Override _

**_Public_ ** _ Chunk generatechunk = new Chunk(world, chunkPrimerOut, chunkX, chunkZ); _

His fingers move even as his mind scrambles to recall what it is supposed to be typing. More code fills his vision before he swipes across the screen, carefully maneuvering the strings of enchanted words around the clumps of swirled darkness on his screen. It is some type of corruption he realizes a second too late as it latches onto his code. 

“Goodbye Dream,” it purrs, and Dream is suddenly reminded of 

_ Dark corruption in his code because admins are meant to be perfect and stable and he was anything but because he was just a teenager with insecurities and anxieties and he was never meant to exist in the first place. He tried to deal with it himself, he did, but he couldn’t ask for help and before he knows it, his admin powers are dark and his mind is dark and everything goes dark but he blinks out of conscious existence feeling darkly wonderful because _

Brightness fills his eyes and he screams in pain as something tears free from him and it is worse pain than being stabbed. The blue sky around him has faded into actual darkness, and he would be suffocating in black if not for his half-corrupted admin screen in front of him. 

[Admin Command Recognized: Dream: NEW CHUNKS LOADING.]

[Warning: chunks IDENTIFIED as Corrupted. Proceed?]

Dream reaches out but he can’t breathe this deep into the void and a shadowy hand reaches out from beside him and grabs his wrist with netherite force before slamming it onto the “yes” display. Of course, he has two hands, so the other one just barely manages to tap the “no” button at the same time. He wants to laugh because the entire situation is vaguely ridiculous and it seems more along the lines of a psychotic hallucinatory breakdown than real life, but he gags instead at what feels like blood bubbles in his esophagus. The screen makes an unhappy screech, disappearing from sight a moment later. And then Dream can’t breathe at all as something that is not his heart is wrenched from his chest. 

The world lags and he passes out. He is just barely aware of the wind flying out of him as he lands heavily on his back on something hard. Hopefully, it is the ground. 

Somewhere else, a community of grieving heroes receives the worst headache of their lives as they watch reality twitch. 

Somewhere else, a pair of men crouched by a grave watch as the flowers glitch in the gentle breeze. Then the axe propped against the headstone promptly falls through the world. 

Three hours pass and the sun is already setting, 

Dream opens his eyes. The sky is blue and the grass is green and it feels normal even though he can’t seem to remember why it would be normal. He’s lying on his back, a thick sensation in his throat so he turns his head and coughs. Black sprays from his mouth as he turns his head, contractions wracking his lungs and burning his throat until his eyes tear up desperately and it feels like somebody has a vice grip on his trachea. 

When the fit finally subsides, the dandelion is dripping with his corruption and it has already withered all the way to the stem. Dream wipes his eyes shakily, sitting up because the night is coming and he knows what that means. Monsters.

He stumbles shakily to his feet, feeling as if he was torn apart and put back together again. The sensation is vaguely familiar. The meadow is strange-- there is no parted grass or previous footprints to indicate that anyone had been here, or that he had walked out to lie down. It looked like he had just randomly appeared. 

Dream’s hand automatically creeps up to his face to adjust his mask, but his fingers touch nothing but bare skin. He feels weirdly exposed. He also feels like he is being watched. The sun has not disappeared over the meadow treeline yet, so there is somebody else with him. 

The yellow grass 

_ Wasn’t it green in the last chunk he had spawned?  _

Wavered in the gentle breeze, and he narrows his eyes. 

Then, as if the fates can sense the tension strung across his shoulders, it begins to rain and the sensation disappears. The rain is cold but at least he can still breathe open and fresh air, unlike 

_ The prison and endless pools of obsidian in the walls and _

Dream shakes the memory from his mind. First things first: he maybe has enough time to cobble together a sword for the night. Next, shelter. 

He is lucky enough to walk across the half-crumbled remains of a cabin. It looks like it had burned down a long time ago, but Dream can definitely make the housework for the night. He has to. 

_ Dream had always been good at improvising.  _

A storm hits and the poor structure finally collapses sometime before dawn. Dream feels a strange sense of deja vu when he mutters that it was never meant to be.


End file.
